Effective Social Media Marketing

Effective Social Media Marketing

Effective Social Media Marketing begins with identifying the key features of Social Media Marketing and how to utilize them to your benefits.  Some of these are relatively straightforward, and require little to no explanation, other keys are less obvious.

Guidelines & General Rules to Follow for Social Media

Find your Brand

Knowing what you stand for as important as knowing who your trying to attract, knowing your brand and staying genuine is what you should be aiming for.

Garnering your Audience

Once you know what you stand for, its time to attract people who are interested in your brand.

Engage your Audience

The pendulum swings both ways, you want to be careful not to neglect your audience, but overstimulating them can be just as daunting.  You need to find a balance for your audience, 3-5 times a week can be more than sufficient in most cases.  The key is to engage them, listen and not pester them. 

Keep it Professional & Appealing

Careful of what you say, once you say it its out there for the world.  With social media becoming all the rage it is often forgot that we can over-share, and frankly they're not all gems.  Be careful of what you say, and keep any opinions or thoughts that might be offensive to yourself, you don't know what will come back to bite you.  Think of it like holding a political office, every word you say will be scrutinized, dissected and examined.  With that in mind try to keep everything on a positive beat.  As the saying goes, Kill 'em with Kindness.

Create a Genuinely interest in your Brand

While engaging your audience you want to keep them on the hook.  Giving away too much information at one time, or updating too much can be a put off.  I say think of it like a first date, your testing the waters, a little nervous, and really want to get to that second date.  You don't have to tell your life story, just some interesting anecdotes.

  Multiple Channel Usage is Key

With Social Networks rising and falling like the great Empires of the past its hard to know who will be on top tomorrow, so expand your reach and use multiple networks to engage your audience.  You may find that you have some members of your audience who have a preference in how they follow you, even though they may be members of multiple social networks.  In addition you may also see that certain channels may have other benefits in how things are presented or communicated.

Find your connection and nurture it

When you find your audience you have to keep them captivated, but also need to listen and connect with them.  Engaging your audience through personal connections can nurture and grow that audience, giving them a feeling of importance and selling your brand.  Think of it as sales, if someone has a bad experience will tell 10 people, but with a good experience you may only have 1 other person hear about it.

Dedicate your time

1 Hour a week, 30 minutes 3 times a week, 5 minutes 5 days a week, dedicate it!
Find out what your schedule will allow, what time you can permit, block out some time in your schedule, something.  So often time is not set aside and you can let your Marketting plan go by the wayside because you didn't dedicate the time to nurture it, you simply phoned it in.  Spending a dedicated, set amount of time with goals of what you are looking to do, a Rhythm if you will, will allow you to make sure that you are staying on track, and growing your Brand in a way that serves your end goals.

Have Fun With It!

Why does it have to be work?  If your having fun with this and connecting with and engaging your audience then it isn't a job, its not a task, its a stress reliever, its something that you enjoy doing and that passion will be conveyed to your audience and allow you to further yourself in this endeavor.

McLuhan: The Medium is the Message

A Brief History

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian theorist and philosopher who focused his life's work on and around media.  He is famous for the coining the phrases "The Medium is the Message" and the "Global Village" a preconception of the internet by almost 30 years.  McLuhan is also famous for his tetrid, also known as McLuhan's Laws of Media.

McLuhan's investigation and observation of Media focused much of his work on the human interaction and relationship to media.  He viewed media as an extension of the human experience, starting at the body.  To explain these interactions and relationships McLuhan came across four things, McLuahn's Tetrads, that occur simultaneously and universally, they are:

McLuhan's Tetrads

Enhance

The question of what is improved or enhanced by the new media?  What is made possible or allowed to accelerate?

Reverse

When a new form is pushed to the limits it will reverse the original characteristics, leaving the question of what is the potential of reversal for this new form?

Retrieve

An earlier action or service that has been brought back into usage through a new form, leaving a question of what obsolesced ground is back and an essential part of this new form?

Obsolesce

What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new media or form?

 Application of McLuhan's Tetrads

McLuhan's Tetrads is applicable to a variety of social behaviors, terms and technologies.  Social networking, for instance, can be applied to McLuhan's Tetrad.  This is a  technology that enhances communication, yet it reverses social interaction outside of its media.  Social media obsolesces proper social behaviors and filters, and it retrieves written and other nonverbal communications.

Timothy Kraft, a Web Analytics Professional and blogger, has a great blog entry that speaks of the ways in which McLuhan's Tetrad effects the internet.  Though the entry is almost 3 years old, the information and application of the Tetrad is still valid. 

Still need proof?  Let's consider Cars for a moment.  Vehicles enhance our method of travel, allowing us to travel great distances in short times, however they also obsolesce a majority of exercise that would normally occur, contributing to laziness and obesity.  However they also retrieve carpools, and groups looking to travel together, yet we find accidents and hold ups from people who do not commute properly, cause accidents or near accidents through negligence or lack of concern, and thus it slows our new method of travel, causing our reverse. 

McLuhan's work is a further and more complex analysis of cause vs effect, cost vs benefit, pro vs con and good vs evil.  Broken down into 4 simple categories, each containing a simple question of how has this media effected our subject in relation to the category.  McLuhan's work forces us to look at the whole picture, to examine it, to weigh it and see its morality, to judge if our cost is worth its benefit.  "The Medium is the Message" is more cryptic than it is straight forward.  It is not a saying that is meant to say that the message is being given to us as is, but it is mean to say that the message is a show of actions, how it is being presented, and further more it is being shown to us, as well as explained and understood, when we examine it through McLuhan's tetrad.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social Media

Web sites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts.

Marketing

the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

Definitions from Dictionary.com

What is Social Media Marketing?

According to Dictionary.com Social media is means to communicate via online communication with large groups of people and marketing is the transfer of goods from a producer or seller.  One would presume that with combination of these terms we would come up with a online communication system that connects professional and social contacts to producers, sellers and consumers for the purpose of buying, advertising, shipping and selling, but is there more?

Social Media Marketing is . . .

• the process of marketing through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
  ~ WebTrends.com
• is hard to truly describe, but a popular definition says that it is the methodical use of marketing with other technological concepts and techniques to achieve through many different media, like viral videos and blogs, because these give your company exposure. ~Brick Marketing
• a form of Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool.  The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. ~ Tech Target

 Depending on where you look, who you talk to and what you read, social media marketing holds a common theme that it is the utilization of the internet, and more specifically Social Media websites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, to advertise and create awareness of a product or service.

 

How is it done?

Social media marketing is done when a company or entity creates awareness of a product or service that they are promoting.  Typically this is done by creating a page for a product or service through a social media website, giving an existing website or page a "Like", "Repin" or "Tweet" button on their page to share the found product/service through Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter respectively, as well as any other Social Media sites that I failed to mention. 

Once these goods or services have an online entity and are being shared, typically users, fans and haters can then comment on them.  It is that dependency on outside consumer and third parties that makes Social Media Marketing so interesting.

Whereas before the bumper stickers held more of ideals and transferred messages of things we thought were funny, cute or messages we held more dear to our heart, now they appear hardly noticed and hhave been replaced with Tweets, Posts and other devices. 

Some approaches traditionally used by companies for marketing, and continually used in Social Media Marketing include the bandwagon approach (everybody's doing it), the spokesperson (think of the Shaun White Stride commercials), emotional appeals, glittering generalities, appeal (snob/ethical), humor and slogans/repetition.   With these traditional techniques there is now a new one, direct unaltered consumer feedback.

One basic example of this is Empire Carpet.  This is more of a forum, but Empire Carpet proactively and tries to address all complaints about negative feedback from various customers.  This ranges from bad sales experiences to property damage.

Another more typical example is NASA's Twitter.  I say this is more typical because through the direct use of a commonly used social media site NASA is able to keep constant contact with its followers, as well as use the sites capabilities, like hash-tags, to expand their audience and awareness.

When done properly, I believe that Social Media can effectively be used for their marketing.  The biggest thing I think for these companies is to think of it like a newspaper's front page, Strong Headlines and amazing pictures.